https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-244-fine-art-and-meat-cleavers/

That’s kinda what I was thinking, yeah.

That’s interesting - this is the first I’m hearing of them doing that to jets.

This isn’t the original, but I took the photo and cleaned it up a bit:

I’d never really thought about the fact that museums doing photogrammetry to preserve artifacts could link up with the folks who 3D print their own Warhammer figures, but here we are

I don’t know how fancy that one is but I’ve pulled at least five working MacBooks from corporate ewaste. All were out of their absurdly-short OS support but Linux Mint (and I’m assuming a bunch of other distros) run great on them. I’ve handed all of them off since reinstalling but I liked the hardware enough to use one as a writing computer until someone needed it.

My landlord exactly. Dude hires people to spray the yard every year because God forbid ants try to approach the building. I’ve tried convincing him not to but he wasn’t having it. I talked to my neighbor and it turns out the guy used to edge the lawn with scissors. Luckily my neighbor is way more agreeable and we’re redoing his lawn more in line with the picture

That’s really interesting to me - Can I ask if you enjoy the work? Or if it gives you a sense of purpose or a sense of being part of something bigger?

Personally, I work at a job I don’t really enjoy but which I’m good at, and which gives me enough time to work on the stuff I care about (from creative projects to fixing furniture and computers to give away). My hobbies are cheap but I’m saving to try and conserve land, and I suppose even if most of my money wasn’t earmarked for that, I’d still work the job because we need health insurance and money to survive emergencies (although I think I’d do more donations per year rather than saving it for one big project).

I derive most of my sense of purpose from the projects, from helping out in my community, and from the conservation stuff. If the need for work vanished somehow, I’d still work on all that other stuff, I think I’d either focus on it more or I’d take on additional volunteer tasks.

I’m not against currency existing, or people getting paid for their labor. I am against things like medical care being locked away behind a paywall, and the threat of things like homelessness, deprivation of medical care, crushing debt, starvation/freezing, being used to crudgel people into working those unpleasant jobs (often more than one, often with no benefits).

I think in a better society people will still want more than basic survival, and if society needs someone to do unpleasant tasks, it’ll still need to make doing those tasks worthwhile.

And to tie it back to the comment I was replying to, I’m skeptical that those unpleasant jobs are enriching the lives of the people doing them, or providing challenges that make them happy when they wouldn’t have otherwise been.

I see a similar argument from conservative relatives sometimes too. That work is like forced purpose for the nations layabouts. I don’t know how common that is - some people will just do nothing I guess, but I think most people have some kind of hobby or interest they’d pursue if they had the time/means. Maybe I’m biased. Most of the folks in my family make and fix things. When they retire, they step up how much they fix/make. I’ve heard a couple of them say they don’t know how they got anything done when they were working all day. Years ago now, when my job had no work for me for a few weeks, I stepped up my oil painting to around eight hours a day. Even now, whenever I get downtime I try to put it to use (my post history is full of those projects). Retired folks are often much more involved in local government, charities, and nonprofits, not because older people are inherently better but because they have the time, and they don’t have to focus just on doing profitable things anymore.

I think I might agree a bit on where our individual purpose comes from? And this is wild speculation on my part, just something I’ve noticed as I try to understand what motivates people who seem to work much differently than I do. It feels like the default around here is to aspire to owning stuff, boats and cars and luxury toys. It seems like the folks who put their ambitions towards charities, helping kids, conserving land, etc, often had something in their life that snagged them and made them care about stuff outside that default. Like, someone makes a ton of money playing sports but uses it to fund youth programs - that person got caught by something outside that default, they found a purpose. Their teammate who just buys a mansion, maybe they never did. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Like every compost heap with pumpkins growing out of it

He was smart enough to get born back when houses and land were cheap after all. You can’t put a price on that kind of foresight

Wouldn’t that be classic punk then?

In some ways, it really feels like city streets were made for people from outside the city driving in for a specific purpose, and public transit, sidewalks, and bike paths are for the people who actually live there.

The whole previous phase of ever-widening streets/highways and paving any open ground for parking almost feels like an attempt to make the cities more like a theme park you drive to and leave at the end of the day. I’m glad things seem to be trending the other way now, with more emphasis on infrastructure I can use living here.

I use that thing a lot, but they usually drive close enough to get the side mirrors too, and generally light up the whole cab. So I spend however long they’re behind me hunched forward to keep their brights out of my eyes, waiting for a passing zone. I’m not even a slow driver.

The temptation to mirror tint my rear windshield goes up every time I drive at night

I grew twenty jalapeno peppers in pots in my first year of apartment living, all descended from a pepper I had in my window in college. Any container can be a plant pot as long as you can add drainage holes - I used a lot of milk jugs and soda bottles cut in half, with old takeout trays to catch the drainage water. Soil is cheap (or free if you’re not picky about what’s in it) and I just watered them with tap water. Ten years later I have fewer peppers but I still have one from that lineage, and my spouse has over two hundred plants in pots scattered through our apartment. We use water from the fish tank as fertilizer, and our main expense is a spritzer of insecticidal soap bought every year or two, and thrift store teacups I drill drainage holes in for some of the succulents. Time and the energy to care for plants are probably the biggest hurdles when you’re broke, but money isn’t necessarily a huge barrier. I hope that helps.